Theodore White—one of the few Americans fluent in Chinese—wrote of the time he was traveling on horseback with Chiang’s forces. They stopped at a village and White was startled when one of Chiang’s officers asked the locals for food and water and identified himself to them as one of Mao’s men. White later wrote,
I asked him why he said that; we were a Nationalist group. And he snapped at me, “Shut up! If we tell them we’re Nationalist guerrillas, they won’t feed our horses or water them.” The episode, which I thought then to be unimportant, keeps coming back to haunt me. The message that the Communists bore, true or false, had penetrated into the hills; they held the “hearts and minds” of these people who could neither read nor write.44
While T. V. Soong was making the heart-tugging case to Roosevelt that without American dollars, China might be lost to the United States, Mao Zedong was in the midst of a titanic battle against the Japanese military. Yet Secretary of War Stimson had almost no information about Mao’s one-hundred-million-person empire or how and why Mao was adding supporters while Chiang was losing them. No one in Stimson’s War Department was studying Mao’s groundbreaking military techniques or coming to terms with the fact that Mao—who had beaten Chiang every time the two men’s armies fought—was the more potent military power in China. With T. V. Soong coaching him, the First Wise Man agreed that Mao was just a nuisance bandit.
On August 20, 1940, Mao had ordered one hundred of his regiments to attack Japanese positions in North China. In what would later be called the Hundred Regiments Offensive, Mao threw 430,000 of his warriors—backed by millions of supportive peasants—against 830,000 Japanese troops. To put that into perspective, the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War involved 90,000 Union forces against 70,000 Confederate forces. In the later Battle of the Bulge, the U.S. and the Allies pitted 600,000 men against 500,000 Germans.
Mao’s forces tore up Japanese-held railways and destroyed Japanese coal mines, bridges, and power stations. They launched lightning attacks on hundreds of isolated Japanese army outposts while separate units ambushed Japanese soldiers coming to the rescue.
Mao’s achievements were truly stunning. While Chiang was kidnapping his recruits, Mao had the message and political savvy to attract and hold followers and mold them into warriors fighting enthusiastically for a cause. Mao got weapons from the fleeing Japanese, and food, clothing, shelter, and hospital services from the sea of peasants.
Mao’s Hundred Regiments Offensive—which killed over twenty thousand Japanese soldiers and captured great quantities of arms—unnerved the Generalissimo. As he had for so many years, rather than applaud a fellow Chinese’s success against Japan, Chiang thought only of how to destroy Mao’s growing power. And when the Generalissimo learned from T. V. Soong of the $100 million coming from his newly recommitted American barbarians, he realized he could now move against Mao.
In January 1941, a unit of Mao’s army—then supposedly Chiang’s ally in the United Front—was camped south of the Yangtze River. The group was not a regular fighting force but rather a headquarters unit with a command staff, hospital personnel, and teachers, many of them women. Chiang ordered this unit to move immediately across the Yangtze to a specified location on the north bank. Mao’s commanders protested that Chiang’s order would force them directly into the guns of waiting Japanese troops. To accept the route set by Chiang would have been suicide for them, which was Chiang’s intention.
Mao’s commander decided to repudiate the instructions and take his headquarters unit—ten thousand troops, officers, nurses, and teachers—east downriver so they could cross the Yangtze at a point less well guarded by the Japanese.
General Ku Chu-t’ung—one of Chiang’s warlord allies acting on his behalf—surprised Mao’s unit with a vastly larger force and massacred many of Mao’s men. The men and the unattractive women were butchered; the pretty women, some of them schoolgirls, were raped by the Nationalist soldiers. (Chiang later promoted General Ku to commander in chief of all his armies.)
Once again—as in 1927—Chiang had sundered the United Front. When Chairman Mao learned the details of the massacre, he cabled this message to the Generalissimo:
Those who play with fire ought to be careful. We formally warn them. Fire is not a very good game. Be careful about your skull.… Our retreat has come to an end. We have been struck with a hatchet and our first wound is a serious one. If you care for the future, you ought to come to offer medical treatment. It is not too late. We have to give this warning for the last time. If things continue to develop this way, the whole people of the whole country will throw you into the gutter. And then if you feel sorry, it will be too late.45
Chapter 8
SECRET EXECUTIVE AIR WAR IN ASIA
Japan can be defeated in China. It can be defeated by an Air Force so small that in other theaters it would be called ridiculous. I am confident that, given real authority in command of such an Air Force, I can cause the collapse of Japan.
—Claire Chennault, letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt1
T. V. Soong’s lobbying efforts in the fall of 1940 were double-barreled. President Roosevelt had come through with more than one hundred million dollars. Now it was time to get Chiang planes and pilots.
Chiang believed that American airpower was the magic barbarian force that would oust the barbarian Japanese from China. An American-supplied and -operated air force held a number of attractions for Chiang, including the fact that it would be fully under his control; he wouldn’t have to deal with managing a patchwork of alliances with local warlords, as he did in the ground war.
Chiang’s idea was to install five hundred planes with pilots at airfields near China’s coast. This armada would first bomb the Japanese military bases in China and their navy ships at sea, then move north to Japan’s home islands to burn down its wooden cities.
Chiang’s dream, however, would be impossible to realize. Effective air war depends first upon secure airfields. Chiang couldn’t hold territory that the Japanese military coveted. If American barbarian planes attacked the Japanese from Chinese territory, the million-soldier-strong Japanese army would simply wipe out the air bases.
Still, dictators have the power and funds to hire sycophants who encourage them in their delusions. For the past three years, Chiang had had a former U.S. Army Air Corps pilot by his side who’d agreed that Japan could be beaten with five hundred airplanes. Chiang paid the American much more than he would have gotten had he stayed in the U.S. military. To avoid State Department complaints that the pilot was a mercenary in Chiang’s employ, Chiang had T. V. Soong pay him as an adviser to the Soong family’s Bank of China. The pilot’s highest rank in the U.S. military had been captain. When he went to work for the Soong-Chiang syndicate, he started referring to himself as colonel. The Generalissimo had hired mercenaries from many countries, but this American was Chiang’s favorite air strategist, a man who, like himself, ignored logistics and military reality. His name was Claire Chennault.
In 1937, forty-three-year-old Captain Claire Chennault realized that his U.S. Army Air Corps career would soon be over. Long at odds with the top USAAC brass, who criticized him for poor strategic and leadership skills, Chennault saw the writing on the wall. The Army wanted him out. This realization hit Chennault hard, and he was hospitalized for what might have been a nervous breakdown.
While still on active duty, Captain Chennault inquired if Chiang Kai-shek could use a mercenary for hire. Chiang viewed him as a U.S. military officer in good standing and had little idea that he was being squeezed out. Chiang made an offer. Chennault recalled: “Would I consider a three-month mission to make a confidential survey of the Chinese Air Force—terms: $1,000 a month plus expenses, a car, chauffeur, and interpreter, and the right to fly any plane in the Chinese Air Force? I would!”2 Having secured a juicy job with Chiang, Chennault resigned from the U.S. Army on April 30, 1937, and was off to China the very next day.
Claire Chennault me
t Madame Chiang on June 3, 1937, in the drawing room of the Soong mansion in Shanghai. Chennault’s reminiscences give a hint of Mayling’s winning ways with American men:
It was the Generalissimo’s wife, looking twenty years younger than I expected and speaking English in a rich Southern drawl. This was an encounter from which I never recovered. To this day I remain completely captivated.… She will always be a princess to me.… I believe she is one of the world’s most accomplished, brilliant, and determined women.3
Mayling told Chennault that he was to study the Chinese air force and make recommendations pronto.
Mayling Soong and Claire Chennault. “She will always be a princess to me,” Chennault wrote. (CPA Media / Pictures From History)
Chiang valued yes-men. Yes was Chennault’s favorite word when dealing with his employer; he assured him that, yes, it was possible to vanquish Japan with five hundred barbarian warplanes.
In October of 1940, T. V. Soong advised Chiang that the time was ripe to make a pitch for the barbarians to provide an air force. Chiang called for Chennault and told him: “You must go to the United States immediately. Work out the plans for whatever you think you need. Do what you can to get American planes and pilots.”4 When Chennault landed in Washington the next month, he went directly to T.V.’s mansion.
The War Department was the place to take a foreign country’s request for warplanes, but the generals would have looked askance at both the message and the messenger—a washed-out American military man making a killing as a high-priced foreign mercenary. To get around this, T.V. told Chennault they would target the two officials who might fall for Chiang’s impossible dream: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry Morgenthau.
T.V. wanted Roosevelt to meet Chennault personally, but that was politically impossible; the subject under discussion was the creation of a U.S.-funded and -staffed secret air force in Asia while the United States was not at war. Instead, Roosevelt asked Tommy the Cork to check out Chennault.
Corcoran had a hand in many of the New Deal revolutions. With his superb people skills and sharp intelligence, he had ingratiated himself with Roosevelt and become arguably the second most powerful man in the country. But by 1940, an administration official observed that Tommy was not the same man he had been earlier in the decade: “Then he had the appearance and the lingo of a campus leader—youthful, full of zest and fun, but essentially the sophomore. There is something hard and tough in his appearance now, and it all came back to me—the resemblance to the hard-bitten tough-guy cynical ward leaders in Chicago.”5 Another insider remembered, “The problem between Tom and the President was that Tom would stand in front of the President and insist on a course of action and pound on the desk. Now you know, no one pounded the desk with Roosevelt.”6
Roosevelt began relying less on Tommy and more on Harry Hopkins, his alter ego, chief aide, closest confidant, and global gofer. FDR’s wife, Eleanor, had brought Hopkins to Roosevelt’s attention when he had been governor. Hopkins was from Iowa, and he was unconventional and got the job done. He had served FDR as a social worker, head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, chief of the Works Progress Administration, and secretary of commerce. In 1940, after an operation to cure his stomach cancer, he had moved into the White House. Hopkins once told Corcoran, “Remember, Tommy, anything you spend an entire day doing I can undo in ten minutes after supper.”7
As the 1940 presidential campaign geared up, the Skipper wasn’t calling Tommy. Corcoran knew Roosevelt well enough to realize what that meant, and after the election, Tommy informed FDR he was leaving to open a private law practice. Roosevelt gracefully asked Corcoran to stay. Tommy thanked him and politely fibbed that he wanted to get back into private life. FDR took Tommy’s new telephone number and wished him luck.
Corcoran opened a law office at 1511 K Street, four blocks from the White House, a street that today is known as Lobbyists’ Row. Tommy—recognizing that the coming war would make the New Deal yesterday’s game—went on to become Washington’s number-one lobbyist for what President Eisenhower would call the military-industrial complex. The Cork had a burning desire to remain in the middle of the game. One insider remarked, “It hurts to be dropped as Tommy was dropped, especially in Washington. And he can’t prove he still has power except by fees.”8
One of Tommy’s first clients was T. V. Soong. Whether Roosevelt realized it is unclear, but when he asked Corcoran to size up Chennault, the president was requesting one China Lobby employee to evaluate another.
Corcoran had no military experience and he knew next to nothing about air-war strategy. In meeting with Chennault, Tommy was not evaluating the wisdom of a secret bombing campaign in Asia but the odds that FDR could launch such a questionable scheme and get away with it. And now that he was in business for himself, Tommy was influenced by another variable: if the decision went a certain way, Corcoran would make a lot of money.
Chennault’s pitch was that if FDR provided Chiang with an air force, victory over Japan was a simple matter. He explained that “a small but well-equipped air force” operating from China would bomb “the airfields, ports, staging areas, and shipping lanes where the Japanese were accumulating their military strength,” which would “force the postponement or cancellation of the Japanese offensive plans.” Once Japan was on the ropes, Chennault would move to his second phase, “directed against the Japanese home islands, to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks.” Chennault told Corcoran that the airfields were already available along the Chinese coast, “only three to five air hours from the biggest industrial cities in Japan.”9
Remembered Corcoran, “If [Chennault] had left in the first ten minutes, I would have written him off as a fanatic.”10 But as Chennault described a country and strategies about which Tommy knew little, he, whether for reasons of patriotism or profit, became convinced that it was a good plan.
Tommy never asked some critical questions. For instance, what would happen once Japan responded to the assaults of FDR’s secret air force and sent its enormous army to attack the Chinese airfields? Chennault had said his airfields were located “three to five air hours from the biggest industrial cities in Japan,” but he’d said nothing about the powerful Japanese air force’s likely retaliation. Nor did Tommy consider the American and international laws that Roosevelt would break by creating a U.S.-funded covert air force in Asia. And what was the United States going to do if Japan shot down a U.S. aircraft and then paraded the American aircrew through the streets of Tokyo? These were some of the questions left unasked.
Tommy reported to FDR that Chennault was a “most original fighting man.”11 Remembered Tommy, “Roosevelt sent back orders for me to take Chennault around town and introduce him to influential men who could keep their mouths shut.”12 The China Lobby had just struck gold.
As Tommy and Chennault made the rounds of Washington’s power brokers, T. V. Soong brought Chiang’s air-war plan to Henry Morgenthau. Morgenthau thought Chiang’s scheme a winner and told T.V. that he would talk to Roosevelt about getting some of America’s highest-tech weapons: long-range bombers.
Morgenthau discussed Chiang’s proposal with Roosevelt over a White House luncheon that was also attended by Mrs. Morgenthau and T. V. Soong and his wife. FDR liked it and told Morgenthau that “overnight [Chiang’s plan] would change the whole picture in the Far East.” But five hundred planes and five hundred pilots was an impossible request for Roosevelt to fulfill. The Army Air Corps wanted every airplane that came off factory lines to train pilots for the European war. (Winston Churchill had successfully pried a few airplanes from the War Department’s grasp, but only a few.) Roosevelt left the door open by telling Morgenthau, “It would be nice if the Chinese would bomb Japan.”13
Morgenthau recorded what happened when he left Roosevelt:
After lunch at the White House, T. V. Soong was with me going back in the car and I said, “Well, his asking for 500 planes is like asking for 500 stars.” I then
said that we might get him planes by 1942, but what did he think of the idea of some long-range bombers with the understanding that they were to be used to bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities? Well, to say he was enthusiastic is putting it mildly.14
Of course Soong was excited. After ten years of trying to snare a barbarian to build Chiang an air force, T.V. had just heard the president’s best friend suggest that the U.S. was ready to help. Morgenthau told Soong that their exchange should be kept hush-hush, that Soong should relay the president’s thoughts “to General Chiang Kai-shek and to nobody else in Washington.”15
The date of these giddy conversations was December 8, 1940, one year before Pearl Harbor.
Tommy the Cork advised people who wished to influence Roosevelt that the best way to get the Skipper’s attention was to use colorful visual aids, the bigger and brighter, the better. T.V. took Corcoran’s advice and personally delivered to Morgenthau’s house a large map of China with brightly colored areas indicating proposed American airfields. (Mao Zedong’s growing empire was not represented.)
The China Mirage Page 21